The Man in the Shed (22 page)

‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘Go get that glue from the top of the fridge. Let’s not disappoint your father.’

Naturally they want to know how it all started. They observe that I was once a raindrop.

‘Yes, briefly.’

‘And let’s see, you were once a sheep?’ They push their glasses’ frames another notch down their noses and look up. This is an invitation for me to back down and reveal my lighter, frivolous side.

Instead I say, ‘Mary.’ That’s who I was seeing at the time.

‘And you’ve been a sparrow, a knife and fork, Henry Ford?
A wood pigeon? You know,’ they say, ‘there are people out there who believe you are a danger to yourself. I mean, really, a sparrow?’

Of course I’m being provocative. After all—a knife and fork, and Henry Ford for god’s sake. Though when they mention the sparrow I usually try to explain. ‘It’s not what you think. Everything is a tight fit and light all at once. A bit like being high.’

Each interview is like every other one. My interrogators come here as doubters and pretty soon they are hunched forward on the edge of their seats saying, ‘No, really?’ and ‘Would you mind telling us a war story?’

Of course it is not my war story, you understand. But it goes like this.

I am a GI and I have just burst in to Hitler’s bunker. He is not dead. He is alive. I repeat—alive. He is looking up the barrel of my gun. Black eyes. Moustache. He is saying, ‘I will give you chewing gum. Do you like Juicy Fruit? No, let me guess. P.K? Arrowmint?’ I’m thinking, Nobody is going to believe this, and, He’s the guy who killed the Jews. I find myself reaching for the Arrowmint when, thank goodness, Sergeant Hawk bursts in with a hand grenade in each hand. Hawk always knows what to do in these situations.

‘Blow the fucker, boy,’ he says.

Then, years later. This is still the same story. Only now I am seventy-three years old. I have grandchildren, and whenever Hitler comes on TV, I want to say, ‘There’s the guy who tried to give me a piece of gum.’ I don’t though. Lord,
no. I keep my trap shut, because the last thing I want is to give them an excuse to run me out to the old people’s home. Hitler is on TV again, but I don’t say anything, and it is the most God-awful frustrating thing in the world.

The magazine writers have usually done their homework. And, although I expect their question, I still don’t have a convincing response.

They note that I was once a writer.

Up to now I have been a wise old head; now they see an embarrassed shopkeeper before them. They sense they have scored a point and sit back in their chairs chewing their pencil ends.

I never thought I would become a shopkeeper. I had my heart set on a different club altogether. Balzac. Dickens. I grew up reading their books, and from the moment I first held a pencil I was trying to circle bits of the world and colour them in. I dreamt of contributing wonderful lives, superior lives. There was a time in my life when I would gladly have given up everything to bring another Pickwick into the world, or to register perfectly the colour and taste of love and revenge.

For a number of years I toiled away at my stories. But did anyone ever read them? The question was too terrifying to ponder for long. In moments of clear-headedness, though, I saw my efforts as cast-off matter, simply as proof of industry—at best, proof of a lonely discourse between me and the flickering screen. I began to blame the book, the thing itself. I developed conspiracy theories—but best I don’t go into these. Suffice to say I was ready to explore other possibilities.

I decided to take my characters out into the world—let them loose on a larger population. I took my impersonations to the pub—the Arms, the Cricketers, the Coachman. A distinctly unliterary audience: bodies swollen with piss and wind, firing questions back at President Kennedy’s driver and Henry Ford. It’s funny what works where—Kennedy at the Arms but not the Coachman, my knife-and-fork act at the Post but not the Bond. Whereas Sergeant Hawk and Hitler’s bunker go down well just about anywhere. The old soldiers come up to me afterwards and want to buy me a pint.

I think it was the Arms where Neil Owen collared me. I didn’t notice him until the end of the evening. He stood by himself at a distance, without a drink in his hand. Sober too, which gave him a certain distinction. He waited until the old soldiers dispersed before coming forward.

I suppose he was in his late thirties, perhaps a little older, though still with a country boy’s eyes—and shy, that much was clear. He’d patiently waited to get my attention and now he had it he didn’t know what to do with it. ‘I enjoyed the show,’ he said. I thanked him and turned to leave. ‘Actually, I’ve come to ask for your help.’ I stopped and when I turned around he offered his hand. ‘Neil,’ he said. ‘Neil Owen.’

‘We’ll sit down, eh, Neil, and you can tell me what this is about.’

It was difficult for him to spit it out. He released his story—a bit at a time. It seems Neil’s wife had developed an alternative world for herself. An imaginative world. A private kingdom with high walls that prevented him seeing over. This was better than I might have expected, more rewarding than listening to the war stories of old soldiers with their flies undone and the corners of their lips cracking open with spittle.

So far so good. Neil spoke about their market garden venture and I imagined a flat bit of dirt with big puffy clouds rolling over the top. He said, ‘We spend a good deal of time alone with our thoughts. Until recently I would have been the first to say that where Judith goes with her thoughts is her own affair. Until very recently, that is.’ He looked up with hurt eyes. ‘My wife is in love with a fellow over in Russia.’ He watched me, gauging the effect of his words.

I nodded. ‘Go on,’ I said.

‘She dreams about Russia constantly. She spends half her time there. One time when Judith was there, she was raped, then this other fellow picked her up and took her home. As far as I know she’s still with him. I don’t know for sure: she’s clammed up recently. I’m pretty sure. Well, more than sure.’ He paused there and released a big breath. He looked up at the ceiling then back at me. ‘You’re the first person I’ve told this to. By the way, I lied before. This isn’t the first time I caught your act. I wasn’t sure, you see, so I had to come again …’

We talked for the next hour. He went back to the beginning and described his wife’s obsession with things Russian.
It had started innocently enough over the winter with her reading a pile of Russian novelists. At first she tried to involve him—reading aloud to share a sentence she felt he might warm to. Gradually, over time, the shelves lengthened with Russian novels and soon she began to dream of Russia. At night Russia was vividly real, unbelievably real. In the mornings she encouraged Neil to put on a ski mask and stand out in the orchard to grasp the texture of Russia. She has told him it is grey with lovely swatches of eye shadow, reds, blues and lighter tones. He put on the ski mask to humour his wife and thought nothing of it.

Then one night his wife lurched awake. Her pyjama top was wet through. Her face was covered in a filmy sweat. He watched his wife’s fingers collect and uncollect. Then her eyes spilt open.

‘Neil?’ she asked.

‘I’m here,’ he said, and instantly her face relaxed.

She lay back in bed and closed her eyes. ‘My god,’ she said.

He leant across and placed his hand on her thumping chest. Then, for the next twenty minutes or so, Neil was the policeman taking down notes as Judith reported back her Russian experience.

Up to now, Russia had been a sunny place—without any dark clefts. But on this night she arrives to a murderous atmosphere rolling through a Jewish neighbourhood. People are fleeing by her. Windowpanes burst onto the street. There are shouts, screams, the whinnying of horses driven into tight
spaces. Mattresses have been dragged outdoors and slashed. White feathers lie all over the street. Wading through them is a proud but mute woman: she holds her blouse wide to show the world where her chest has been treated like tree bark for her attacker to carve his initials. An old man staggers out a doorway carrying his bearded head in his hands, blood fountaining out an open neck.

Still, Judith is at the safe remove of the tourist. She is there but not really there. She is wondering where to go next when an older woman takes hold of her elbow and guides her through a cottage to a courtyard. The woman seems to know what to do and when she pauses to gather up a lost kitten Judith is reassured by her composure. They climb a ladder to a loft where they arrange themselves face-down on the floorboards. After a few minutes the ghastly violence sweeps underneath them for another street.

Judith paused there, and Neil, thinking it was the end of her account, got up to make them both a cup of tea.

Judith didn’t sleep that night. She fidgeted beside Neil until he too lay looking up into the dark—the two of them kept awake by events in Russia.

A day passed. Judith was planting tomatoes. Burying the trowel and pulling the earth to one side, inserting the plant. Neil walked over to his little farm machine, crouched behind her to stroke her bare arms. He said to her, ‘Judith, can we go back to the other night, that moment you are in the loft …’

She paused from the trowelling, allowing her thoughts to catch up with the request. Then she stood up and looked him
squarely in the eye. ‘Just remember,’ she said, ‘you were the one who asked.’

Back to the loft they go. At the sound of the glass breaking in another neighbourhood, she and the other woman raise their heads and look at each other, as if to ask, ‘Is it safe?’ Judith, for one, has had enough. She wants to get out of Russia and return to the Wairarapa. In the loft, the righteous indignation of the tourist has been fermenting inside her. Now, she thinks, if she stands up to the window she will see the gummy hills of home. She is utterly convinced. And when the other woman hisses at her to stay down, Judith smiles confidently in the knowledge of what she knows.

As she approaches the window, Russia comes bounding back into view. Apparently there is no way out. She is the marooned tourist everyone has read about and fears themselves becoming—trapped behind unfriendly borders without a passport, without a visa, without the language to negotiate. Down in the street she sees the Moldavians wiping their bloody knives. At that moment the kitten miaows and a boy of about ten looks up. Briefly, their respective worlds teeter and shift, and then the boy’s eyes begin to narrow and Judith distils his thoughts—his father has promised to reward his alertness with a toy. Her life is about to be traded for a toy soldier. Slowly, the boy raises his finger. One by one, the Moldavians withdraw from their conversation and look up. After a brief consultation, a number of them start for the loft; she can hear them coming up the ladder, their knives and hammers banging against the wood.

The rest of it—the rape—she refused to go into. Although she did admit to Neil that even as the Moldavians were climbing the ladders she had this idea that she would still be all right. She would explain that she was a New Zealander and after that everything would be set right. The mob would apologise and bashfully retreat. ‘However …’ she said, and she moved on to afterwards, to that moment when a hand cups her groin and she is being turned upside-down, to when she is free-falling. The street races up, she feels its hard shoulder and glimpses the sky reeling away.

That afternoon Neil took himself off to the library. He cycled all the way into town, to the Sea Breeze Arcade. There’s a video store, a coffee lounge whose proceeds go to cancer research, a travel agent’s office that is haunted—with a man grown pale who sits behind a dull window all day stirring sugar into his coffee.

As Neil described this, I was thinking, Well, there’s the problem in a nutshell. It has to do with where they live. Judith is bored out of her mind. The two of them are going crazy in the childlessness of their days and nights. Too preoccupied with themselves, is my theory. Still, I don’t say anything.

In the library Neil asked for books on Russia, and the librarian suggested he look under
Poetry & War
. He flicked through some poetry. Snow, crows, the birch trees in winter, exile. In the
Large Books
section he pulled down a volume of photographs of Soviet industrial achievement up to 1933—one photo showed a pyramid of men, each one standing on the shoulders of another, to paint the vast face of a newly built
dam. No sign of Judith’s Russia there.

Days, weeks passed. Then one night Judith came forward with fresh information that advanced the story. There was the rape, and later she was thrown from the loft and left for dead. Here’s what she told Neil.

When she gains consciousness she finds herself in quiet surroundings. In this strange bed, in someone else’s bedclothes. She is aware of chickens pecking outside the window by her bed. In the upper part of the window she can see a line of black crows looking in from the bough of an old walnut.

She told Neil a doctor bathed her. A kind and gentle soul, she called him.

The doctor organises a servant to heat up some water. Then, when the water is ready the doctor and servant help her from the bed. The doctor rolls up his sleeves. He kneels beside the bathtub and asks Neil’s wife to turn her knees into mountain peaks.

‘This way, my little bird,’ he says, washing one leg, then another.

‘What else?’ Neil asked. ‘Did he soap all of you?’

‘He helped to bathe me, yes.’

‘Your breasts?’

‘Of course,’ said Judith. ‘My breasts are part of me.’

‘And down there?’

‘Neil. For god’s sake.’

‘And he called you “my little bird”?’

‘All right. That’s it,’ she said. ‘I’m turning out the light.’

But Neil, anxious to get to the bottom of this, persisted,

‘How many times has he bathed you, over there, in Russia?’

‘I’m turning out the light, Neil. I’m switching it off.’ And then, needlessly, as he reports it, ‘The light is out.’

‘Can you help me?’ Neil leant across the table in the pub. ‘Just one night—that’s all I ask—to slip into her dreams.’